PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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Not terrible but not really much of a match. The crowd gets hot at the end but the ending is lame and with Nash you never really know if he was late on purpose or not, just so he could force a kickout of Goldberg's finish. That's not *too* conspiratorial of me, is it? Sting gets a big pop, but the production on Savage's announcement is so odd (a voiceover with text accompaniment, with no visual of Randy) that I don't think it really registers, particularly since they close the show with it with nothing further from the announcers. Not a good way to build a PPV of course, but that's a marked improvement over some of WCW's other attempts at such this year. -
Flair as NWA champ used to do it a lot. He shakes hands with Windham before their legendary Worldwide match, and on at least an occasion or two against Kerry.
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The irony of content stealers complaining about their stolen content getting stolen.
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Eyeball estimates put the crowd at 2500. Not a lot compared to Cow Palace seating, but ROH would kill for a number like that.
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We join just in time to see Kidman take a loony belly-to-belly suplex over the top rope to the floor. Good action after that with Rey working a good hot tag and a good tease of a finish when Saturn catches Rey on the springboard huracanrana and drops him with the DVD, but the Horsemen cost Raven & Saturn the tag belts. I can deal with this being the tag division even as the rest of the company sinks into the quagmire.
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Good recap of what the Yearbook mostly skipped from Monday's Raw. Shamrock bulldozing through the Brood and no-selling the bloodbath is one of the cooler moments of 1999 Russorama booking. This is slightly excessive but tolerable until we get to the stuff about Undertaker "believing this character that was created." The phrase "living the gimmick" is uttered. I'll grudgingly admit that the home invasion stuff and Stephanie not feeling safe there is a good bit of plot-convenience for her to be at Raw every week.
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Kind of telling of something that after such a raw viscerally emotional tag match, the promoter of the company has to resort to this kind of gaga bullshit for her match. I could give a fuck how much money or mainstream interest this drew, if this action is indicative of the feud as a whole I'm glad it was ignored. As far as matches between '80s icons put on well past their sell-by date I'll stick with Lawler & Dundee and the Fabs, thanks.
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If you're not getting emotionally drawn into this one by the end I'm not sure you have a soul. Kato and Satomura look completely helpless for the first 3/4 of this as Aja shrugs off almost everything they try, even their finishers. And of course Kong and Ozaki are way more willing to fight dirty and more effective doing it. Aja's no-selling and constant cut-offs almost reach the point of annoyance, but this was like one of those movies where you really had to watch all the way until the end until you could really appreciate what was going on before, as Aja handles her gradual weakening perfectly, and the battle between Kato and Ozaki in trying to prevent saves is almost as compelling. Satomura is joshi's next great young babyface and plays her role to precision, as she wrestles not only a gutsy but incredibly smart match in waiting for Aja to show any kind of opening that she can capitalize on. Right when this feels like the babyfaces have fired every bullet in their chamber, she manipulates Ozaki into running interference on her behalf and drops Aja with one last Death Valley Bomb to pull off the shock win. Joshi is filled with youngsters putting up gallant efforts and losing in the end, so when they get the win here it's the best feelgood moment of the set so far as Satomura and Kato seemingly have overcome the longest odds in a match since Hokuto & Kandori. Oh, and there's a fantastic, chaotic post-match as well that leaves you drooling for more, as if the match wasn't enough to do that on its own. This match isn't *that* good but it's a strong MOTYC for '99 without question.
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I don't know if it happened already and I missed it (actually I think he pinned Hansen in the '98 Carny, for what that was worth by then), but we're itching pretty hard for Akiyama to pin one of the Four Corners in a singles match. I thought they might pull the trigger here, but Kobashi, like Stan, has the Lariat in reserve and it gets him the win despite a strong gameplan from Jun. Loved Jun always being able to go back to Kobashi's knee to break any attempted runs by Kenta, and his facebuster off the apron was a pretty holy-shit spot. Kenta wins but doesn't exactly look like a winner after the match.
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This would have been better served as a straight brawl instead of confining everyone inside a cage. But I guess balcony dives were played out, so we get a post-match cage dive instead. Hopefully this is the end of Mr. Mustafa.
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Yeah, yawn city here even as Douglas and Credible clearly are trying to have a good wrestling match. ECW Arena completely lost its charm when they made it over. I want the full Bingo Hall look and that security guard guy randomly walking around back.
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Candido looks awful and the crowd is sitting on their hands at the finish. We get another Tazmissionplex through the table and I'll at least give them points for consistency. I'd rather go through the "been there, done that" with the injury angle re-do than have it become Just Another Spot. The crowd chants "Fuck you Taz" as Candido is immobilized and taken out, so he dumps the stretcher and beats up Candido some more before choking him out as Joey laments the broken neck history of both Candido and Taz, while the fans are now suddenly cheering Taz again and singing along with his catchphrase. How did the ECW Arena trained seals not break *their* necks from whiplash? And just why is the champion decisively vanquishing his challenger supposed to make the title match at Hardcore Heaven more appealing to see?
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Axl Rotten whines about the WWF Hardcore title. Joey Styles hypes CyberSlam while dressed as Irwin R. Schyster. Shane Douglas again fails to grasp the concept of Pulp Fiction as a series of punchy, CONCISE little bits. And more Big Two whining. Super Crazy puts over ECW and its fans. Sign Guy Dudley and Joel Gertner play around with a camera to the consternation of the Dudleys. Buh Buh Ray weeps for he has no more worlds to conquer. Whoops, we're actually making history with this piece, as Joel introduces the Dudleys to STEVE CORINO, making his Yearbook debut. The Dudleys are nonplussed until Gertner informs them that he's carrying $5000, that's theirs if they take out Balls Mahoney for him. Doring and Roadkill do their usual bit. Super Crazy freaks out about something. Jerry Lynn, wearing glasses that make him look like Randy the Ram, has words for RVD. Lynn's not much of a talker. The Dudleys jump Balls and Axl in the locker room. A bad start to Pulp Fiction but it picked up towards the end--oh, it's not the end, because God forbid we don't hear from Storm and Credible. Oh, Lance is bickering with his tag partner--that's fresh. Dawn Marie continues her Beulah impersonation.
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Two and a half years later, another point in support of this that Cornette has talked about is that Lawler, much like modern WWE, would never actually release anybody himself. So it got to the point where he was booking random mid-carders in 10-man tags in the second match of an MSC show. Wish we could have seen more of the match, but the Fabs do project as mid-life-crisis douchebags quite well. Plus the eternal conflict between Lawler and Dundee continues.
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I wasn't opposed to the WCWSN talk show format, but with the talk show format *and* long 2-out-of-3-falls main events it reeked of Frey and WCW trying to eat their cake and have it, too. You can either do a Southern version of TNT with non-wrestling guest commentators or have long, dry, technical main events, but doing both was a collision of worlds that didn't work. (Dave Casper, of all people, was another guest.) I believe Campus Crush was going to be a PPV from Boulder, Colorado.
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"Sports entertainment" on its own as a term isn't a big problem. The refusal to say "belt" on its own isn't a big problem. The insistence on using full names each and every time on its own isn't a tiny problem, but would probably be okay if that were the only entry in the WWE Talking Stylebook. Any one of these linguistic quirks we've gone over would be fairly easy to ignore. But when they're all beaten into your brain over the course of 3 hours, it's death by a thousand cuts.
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Road Dogg seems like he should have been disqualified twice, for using Blue Meanie as a foreign object and then hitting Goldust with the Meanie below the belt. Meanie interferes to give Goldust the Intercontinental title again. Goldust rambles about nothing in particular after the match.
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Not feeling the love for this, especially considering these two had a much better match last year. I like the idea of trashing the set in anticipation of the new changeover, but I don't understand brawling all over the place and then settling into Hogan working scientifically. There are ways to make that thematic change work but they don't do it here. Dumb finish with Flair wacking DDP with a Lance Storm-level chair shot, then DDP being out for like a 10-count after Charles Robinson refuses to count, Hogan cold cocks him, and Mickey Jay wakes up to count instead. I can't accuse anyone here of not working hard but the psychology was all over the map and the finish was more overbooked than the WM15 main event. Watch the post-Bash at the Beach match instead if you want a good one between these two.
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The bickering announcers were really distracting--Schiavone and Heenan are clearly visibly losing it at this point, though they probably both checked out mentally ages ago. Anyway, let's not let that get in the way of a terrific tag bout, one that teases ending in your standard 3-5 minutes, but Kidman kicks out and we go into a long (for Monday night TV) finishing stretch. Is Nash delegating the tag team booking to somebody else? All of a sudden after ignoring the titles for years, in the midst of all the other chaos going on, WCW has put together a nifty little group of teams going after the belts.
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This is instantly the most compelling program in WCW all year, so naturally it's practically forgotten about in 7 days. As it is, this *might* have been enough to salvage Bret since he has a compelling reason to go after almost any top guy on the roster, but both politics (predictably) and real life (in a way that no one could imagine) would intervene.
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